Energy
Exciting demos from this week include Samsung showing a phone battery that can be charged in a minute. This is technology that could revolutionize the world energy market. The challenge with energy is transporting it. Oil is valuable because it allows us to transport energy in the form of petrol / diesel, which by comparison with charging a car for hours only be to able to drive 100 miles, keeps petrol still one of our most portable ways of transporting energy for the moment.
Social Ebb and Flow
WhatsApp has reached 30 billion messages a day. Having recently been part of a birthday party organised across many time zones and countries, I can easily see why this straight forward app is such a hit. As WebRTC makes HTML5 video communication easier and more practical - watch out for this emerging standard (webRTC) to be part of the next communications evolution.
Why Technology Causes Deflation
If we all stay at home and save our pennies then the economy stagnates and we all end up poorer. When we take our goods to the local market and start trading, we increase our collective wealth.
Taking our fruit and veg to the market, means competing with other traders and that keeps prices down. Walking around a market buying fruit and veg it is easy to get the best price, and hardly surprising you end up with a much better price than the local supermarket.
When it comes to plumbers, electricians and builders it was not always so easy to compare apples for apples and get the best price, but technology is changing that. Now we can compare prices online for pretty much everything from local petrol stations to secondhand Rolex’s, and that means lower prices for consumers and increased competition. All of which is having a big deflationary effect. As technology also boosts our efficiency and productivity, expect that to add to deflation as we see this downward pressure continue for some years to come.
How We Feel About the Economy
Finally with so many conflicting forces pushing the markets both up and down at the same time, it is hardly surprising to see market share prices jumping around. Since one of the biggest factors aside from colossal government debt is general confidence, it is interesting to see that our general outlook is still positive overall.